Authors

Helen Plado, Liina Lindström

Abstract

Estonian concessive clauses – markers and positions in the chain of subordination and coordinationConcessive clauses indicate that the situation or event in the main clause is contrary to expectation in the light of the situation or event in the concessive clause. The two clauses that form a concessive sentence have factual character.Concessive clauses are characterized by a multiplicity of markers. In Old Written Estonian, the most frequently used markers of concessives were ehk (…) küll and et (…) küll; todaythe former is marginal and the latter has lost its concessive function entirely. In contemporary Estonian, the most frequent concessive conjunctions are kuigi (formed from the temporal-conditional conjunction kui + the emphaticparticle -gi/-ki) and ehkki. In both Old Written Estonian and contemporary Estonian, concessive markers (with the exception of sellele vaatamata et, sellest hoolimata et, kuna) include the emphatic particle, either küll or (more frequently in today’s language) the affix -gi/-ki. The concessives in use today had emerged by the 1930s.Although concessive clauses have been considered to be a type of subordinated clause, they have a strong semantic resemblance to adversative sentences, which are coordinated structures. Between concessive and adversative sentences, there lies a fuzzy transition area, and in some constructions, the concessive markers kuigi and ehkki can be used as coordinating conjunctions.However, word order indicates clearly that concessive clauses act as main clause constituents. If the conditional clause precedes the main clause, the following main clause almost always begins with the verb, i.e. the concessive clause behaves like a constituent that triggers inversion of the subject and predicate. This word order also helps to convey the concessive meaning, as it helps to distinguish between concessive and other possible relations between the clauses. The concessive clause itself, however, usually exhibits the same word order as in a typical independent sentence, i.e. it does not tend to be verb-final, as many other subordinated clauses are. This may be caused by its greater independence, as well as by the general tendency of subordinated clauses to show SVX order.

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